Are you sure?
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
Recollections of the Early Days of the Vine Hunt and of its Founder William John Chute Esq. M. P. of the Vine - Together with Brief Notices of the Adjoining Hunts
by Sexagenarian
Ratings:
146 pages2 hours
Summary
This vintage book contains a description the Vine hunt in Hannington, England. Hannington has been a popular location for fox hunting for centuries, and continues to host events each year. With historical information and details of notable people and events, this volume is highly recommended for those with an interest in the history of English fox hunting, and would make for a worthy addition to collections of allied literature. Contents include: "Notices of Hunting in the Last Century", "Old Stories", "The Origin of the Vine Hunt", "The Hounds and Horses", "The Men", "William John Chute, Esq., of the Vine, M.P.", "The Vine Hunt, 1824 to 1834", "Mr. Warde's Hounds in the Craven Country", "Truman Villebois, Esq., and the H.H.", etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. This volume is being republished now in an affordable, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on the history of fox hunting.
Publisher: Read Country BooksReleased: Aug 25, 2017ISBN: 9781473338784Format: book
Book Preview
Recollections of the Early Days of the Vine Hunt and of its Founder William John Chute Esq. M. P. of the Vine - Together with Brief Notices of the Adjoining Hunts - Sexagenarian
RECOLLECTIONS
OF
THE VINE HUNT.
LETTER I.
NOTICES OF HUNTING IN THE LAST CENTURY.
June. 1864.
MY DEAR FRIEND,—When you met me lately at Hampton Court, and asked me to supply any recollections that I might retain about the early days of the Vine Hunt, and of its popular founder, Mr. Chute, my first impression was that I could produce little or nothing to the purpose. But on further consideration I am inclined to believe that, if such particulars are worth recording at all, there is no one now living better qualified for the task than myself: for I was intimate with Mr. Chute from my childhood to the time of his death; I conversed much with sportsmen whose recollections went back a generation before my birth; and I lived in familiar intercourse with many masters of hounds. I dare say I am acquainted with some facts, the memory of which is fast fading away, and can tell some curious stories that are known only to myself. I will therefore attempt the work that you have been pleased to impose upon me, and will so far enlarge it as to include some brief notices of what I saw in countries adjoining to the Vine. You must expect a little egotism when you call on a sexagenarian to recount his own recollections; but I will try to say as much of other people and as little of myself as I can.
But before I enter on the proposed subject, I must try to give some idea of the different styles of hunting which prevailed in the last century and in the present.
I believe that, a hundred years ago, though there was abundance of hunting, yet it was not conducted so systematically, nor generally on so grand a scale, as it is now. The sport was diffused amongst many smaller establishments, instead of being concentrated into a few large ones. This was especially the case with harriers, of which most country squires, and some tenant farmers, kept each his own cry of hounds, more or less numerous according to his means; and came near to a realisation of that ideal old English gentleman in the song,
Who never hawked nor hunted but on his own ground.
For instance: late in the last century, two neighbouring squires, Terry of Dummer and Harwood of Dean, kept each a regular pack of harriers, scarcely five miles apart; yet the Digweed family, who then, as now, rented nearly the whole parish of Steventon, had a few couples of beagles, with which they hunted over the ground that they occupied midway between the two.
But, besides the numerous packs of harriers belonging to individual proprietors, there was a peculiar kind, called a town-pack, or a town-cry, not quite extinct now, but then kept in many country towns and villages. These hounds had no kennel, but were billeted, as it were, amongst the tradesmen and other principal inhabitants of the place, and were often to be seen lying about before their owners’ doors. On hunting days, they were collected together by a horn blown in the street. A friend of mine recollects seeing this operation performed in the town of Crawley, in Sussex. He says: ‘A man on foot, with hobnailed boots, went blowing a horn through the town and hamlet to the place of meeting, and collecting the drowsy blue-mottled southern harriers.’ These hounds were followed by men on foot, carrying long poles to help them over the great banks and ditches, the country being then considered impracticable for horses. Crawley, however, is now the centre of a well-appointed pack of foxhounds.
Nor was it at all unusual, in those days, to hunt both hare and fox with the same hounds. Mr. Chute and Mr. St. John had both done this, before they kept regular packs of foxhounds and laid the foundations of two permanent foxhunting countries. Mr. Villebois, also, before he was master of the H. H., kept harriers in the Candover country, which certainly were not altogether guiltless of vulpine blood; for I remember, in his dining-room at Harmsworth, a painting representing a few couples of these hounds running into a fox, nearly as big as themselves, on an open down, and Mr. Villebois himself in the act of springing from his horse.
Less than fifty years ago, there lived near Hailsham, in Sussex, Mr. King Sampson. This gentleman was an excellent sportsman and exceedingly popular, and is indeed still looked back to with respect, as the father of foxhunting in that country; but his mode of foxhunting was peculiar. He kept a pack of powerful harriers with a cross of the foxhound; and with these he hunted hare habitually, and fox occasionally; that is to say, whenever he thought he could find one. On these occasions he met very early in the morning, keeping the body of his pack in couples, and trusting to two or three steady old foxhounds for finding. With these he would go quietly round the gorse covers on the Southdown Hills; and if there was no drag, nor any symptom of a fox having gone into the cover, he did not waste time in drawing it, but went on to another. As soon as a fox was found, the rest of the hounds were uncoupled, and, when once put on the scent of the fox, were sufficiently steady to it through the day. In this way Mr. King Sampson is said to have shown excellent sport; and I have no doubt that he killed many a fox which a modern pack of hounds, with a modern Brighton field of some hundreds of men, women, and children in the midst of them, must needs have lost. I need scarcely add that this same country has long been hunted by an excellent pack of regular foxhounds.
Late in the last century, some friends of my father attempted to hunt fox with a pack of harriers on the Nettlebed Hills in Oxfordshire. At the beginning of the season they succeeded well enough; but after Christmas, when foxes had become stronger and more dispersed, these hounds proved unequal to the great distances and long draws required of them, and were generally half tired before the fox was found.
But besides these irregular and desultory modes of foxhunting, of which I have given so many instances, I believe that even regular packs of foxhounds were more frequently kept on a small scale, and differed more from each other, according to the means and sportsmanship of the owner, than is usual in these days, when everybody has the advantage of knowing how other hunts are conducted, and everyone at least aims at one common standard of perfection. In those days a pack of foxhounds was considered to be private property, which the owner was as free to manage according to his own will and pleasure as he was to settle the arrangements of his own shooting or fishing. Hounds were not then advertised in the newspapers. Railroads did not bring men and horses from places twenty or thirty miles distant to the meet. Bad roads and imperfect means of communication confined each hunt within narrow limits. The field usually consisted of a few near neighbours of different ranks, to whom the master might, or might not, send notice, according to his convenience. Mr. Chute, in his earlier days, seems to have had no scruple in taking out his hounds without notice to anyone. A gentleman now living informs me that, when he was a young lad, he had gone to the Vine, believing that the hounds were to hunt that day; but either he had mistaken, or Mr. Chute had changed the day—the one was as likely as the other. At any rate, the hounds were not to go out. On his appearance, however, Mr. Chute, finding that they had not been fed, good-naturedly took them out and found a fox for him. There are also letters from Mr. Chute, written about 1795 from the House of Commons, when he found that he could get away the next day, desiring that the hounds might meet him in the afternoon with a bag fox, in order to get a gallop on his way home. Beckford, who wrote soon after the middle of the last century, must certainly have considered masters of foxhounds at liberty to act in this independent manner; for he recommends that the place of meeting should not be fixed till the probable state of the weather could be known; and that, when any day proved a very bad scenting one, the master should take his hounds home at once, and go out the next day instead.
The consequence of this independence was a great development of individual character, so that many hunting establishments reflected strongly the peculiar humours and oddities of their owner. Take, for example, the celebrated miser, Mr. Elwes, whose biographer records that his whole foxhunting establishment never cost him so much as 300l. a year; who obliged his tenants to maintain his hounds for him during the summer at their several farms; whose one man-servant, old Thomas, for four pounds a year, milked the cows, groomed the horses, looked after and hunted the hounds, and attended at his master’s meals, yet could not escape frequent reproaches from his master as ‘an idle dog, who wanted to be paid for doing nothing.’*
This was an extreme case; but the establishment of Mr. Poyntz, whom I shall have to mention afterwards, though maintained, I believe, on a scale sufficiently liberal, was yet imbued with much of the eccentricity of the master—whose pleasure it was to do nothing as other people did—and was conducted in a manner with which, in these days, no subscriber would put up for a single season, and for which indeed few owners of property would now preserve foxes, even if the master kept them, as Mr. Poyntz did, at his own cost.
The boundaries of each hunt, also, were more vague and fluctuating, and more dependent on the personal influence of the master. In some places different packs almost jostled each other, whilst in some parts large districts remained unoccupied, or only occasionally visited: so that there are many instances on record of foxhounds being taken for a time into distant places quite unconnected with their home country. In these days almost all the huntable portion of England is parcelled out into different hunts, with definite boundaries; and, moreover, most countries are now supposed to belong not so much to the master of the pack as to the general body of gentlemen of whose landed property it consists. Consequently these boundaries are not only more accurately defined, but are also held by a more permanent tenure, and with a firmer grasp; a larger number of persons are interested in preserving them; any intrusion would be an offence not only against a single brother sportsman, but against a whole neighbourhood; while the unwritten law of foxhunting has taken such strong possession of the public mind, that such an intrusion would be considered to be as ungentlemanlike as if a man had killed partridges on his neighbour’s home farm. But in those days people took their hounds without scruple wherever there seemed to be an opening for them; and a popular country gentleman, with some landed property of his own, could usually obtain the command of sufficient country for his purpose.
When I was a boy, there was a very old sporting farmer who still came out occasionally
You've reached the end of this preview. Sign up to read more!
Page 1 of 1